Category Archive

In September of 2018, Elliott, CTO of GorillaStack collaborated presented at AWS Community Day in San Francisco on the importance of elasticity in AWS and the best way to automate for optimal performance. Optimise Your AWS Environment Concentrating on the Well Architected Framework, the presentation wAs a good opportunity for developers to get an overview on optimising environments to be: … Read More

…. other than writing scripts to manipulate my resources Time is the only commodity we cannot earn back in life. To make matters worse, it is a commodity that we are perpetually losing. With our hours at work, we want to make sure that we triage our tasks and utilise our time for maximum leverage. We want to be as … Read More

CloudTrail is an amazing source of data, rich with API call history, allowing us to monitor who is attempting to do what within our AWS accounts. However, it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. As every call is logged (including assumption of role, switching of roles and even creation of a log stream), we end up with a lot of logging … Read More

Here at GorillaStack we’ve been using LetsEncrypt to issue SSL certificates for custom domains on AWS’s API Gateway for all our Serverless projects. While we love this service, securing a custom domain for API Gateway required a time consuming, manual process to be repeated every time a certificate expired. That’s why we were so excited by the recent announcement of … Read More

AWS Lambda just got a bit better thanks to IteratorAge. If you’ve ever read the GorillaStack blog, you’re likely well-versed on many of AWS Lambda’s many use cases. Of particular interest in the context of Amazon’s latest announcement is the way in which the compute service works in tandem with CloudWatch. Lambda can assist in monitoring functions and reporting metrics … Read More

The Serverless framework is awesome and we love working with it! We even used it to build a Serverless Hipchat Bot. Side note: you can check out our Serverless HipChat Bot boilerplate repository. However, we quickly found that the feedback loop in development was really slow – every time we wanted to test a change, we had to deploy to … Read More

Have you ever wanted to try out a full serverless architecture? Or write a HipChat plug-in? The new open source boilerplate from GorillaStack helps developers deploy the back ends for their plugins to Amazon Web Services’ serverless products in Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB and S3. Atlassian, together with Amazon Web Services, engaged GorillaStack to develop an open source bolierplate repository … Read More

One thing that I have always been keen to get from AWS Lambda is configurable environment variables that can be set for each indivudual Lambda function. One thing I loved about the Serverless framework is that it supports a notion of environment variables, stored in a hidden ‘_meta’ folder and substituted in when the functions are deployed to Lambda. On … Read More

Recently we updated our open source project Auto Tag, a Lambda function that listens to CloudTrail to tag your AWS resources with their creator after they are created. When updating, I noticed that a month ago, AWS released a Node v4.3.2 runtime for AWS Lambda. I was super excited! Previously we were using babel to transpile our es6 source code … Read More

We were excited to have the opportunity to share GorillaStack with everyone at Sydney’s first 2 day AWS Summit. The Summit demonstrated the need for AWS Cost Optimisation. Talks such as “Business: Cost Optimisation at Scale” from Evan Crawford at Amazon Web Services amplified this customer demand. And yes, that is gorillas.bas running in the background (check out our version … Read More